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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting

Is the goal to be interesting or to figure out the truth?

and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status

It's not unearned, it's a fundamental property of heritability that it transfers through phenotypic causality, and there's lots of phenotypic causality to go through.

It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking.

No, the phenotypic null hypothesis agrees that the measurements work, it just points out something about what they mean.

But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories.

I understand that the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a knockdown argument against HBD, and that it is not meant to be. Instead it covers the validity of various types of arguments.

Like if HBDers keep using argument that are invalid due to the phenotypic null hypothesis, and they refuse to learn about the phenotypic null hypothesis, then surely critics of HBD are in the right in dismissing HBDers as clueless about behavior genetics. You can't expect anti-HBDers to want to spend infinite time knocking down nonsense arguments. (Of course that point is symmetric - anti-HBDers also often come up with nonsense.)

Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.

The null hypothesis isn't about race differences in IQ, it's about within-population heritability in all sorts of things.